Using Seagate External Hard Drive for Mac Time Machine Backup

If you’ve just purchased yourself a new slim Seagate external hard drive to use as a back up for your mac and you get the following error: seagate The backup disk is not in Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format, which is required.

Don’t panic! It’s a very simple fix and only takes a few moments.

Press Command & Space rapidly in unison to bring up Spotlight Search

Type: Disk Utility

Choose the Seagate drive and click erase

This will pop up a window to rename the drive. Do so. Name it whatever you would like to see when it pops up in Finder

Ensure you have chosen the following settings for the next two drop-downs:
Format: OS X Extended (Journaled)
Scheme: GUID Partition Map

Click “Erase”. This will create a new instance of this drive with the correct formatting to allow the Seagate drive to be used with Time Machine